Reddit begins actively removing subreddits that promote harassment

Reddit announced a few months ago plans to shutdown harassment on the site. Today, it made the first move against harassment, closing five prominent subreddits attacking the community and people on the Internet.

The main subreddit banned, /r/fatpeoplehate, had hundreds of thousands of users before the ban. Even though the content of the subreddit was blatant harassment, some users claim that subreddits shouldn’t be shut down because of the content alone. That said, /r/fatpeoplehate was known for sending gangs of people onto specific targets, by highlighting Twitter, Facebook and Instagram posts without hiding identification.

/r/hamplanethatred, /r/transfags, /r/neofag and /r/shitniggerssay were all banned today as well, although these four subreddits had less than 5,000 active subscribers, making their reach much lower.

It is a good start in the move to clean up Reddit, but some users have complained that these aren’t the main offenders compared to /r/ShitRedditSays, /r/SlutJustice, /r/coontown.

There are also still plenty of gross subreddits like /r/BurningKids, /r/rapingwomen and /r/watchpeopledie, but CEO of Reddit Ellen Pao said it will not ban ideas for the time being.

Reddit has been making a move to appeal to advertisers, but with no control over where an ad might be placed it has a hard sell. Considering a business might appear to be supporting a subreddit like /r/fatpeoplehate if an ad appears, some may have thought twice about advertising.

The new bans have been received quite poorly by the Reddit community. There are quite a few upvoted comments attacking Ellen Pao, the Reddit admin staff and Reddit in general, some even claiming Reddit is turning into the new Digg.

Voat.co is being pushed as the new Reddit without the censorship, although we do not expect the majority of Reddit users to be that annoyed with the decisions. dIn a hilarious case of irony, several of the top commenters trashing Reddit have been gilded—meaning it is indirectly putting money in Reddit's pocket.